In late 2015, a team of Cambridge University researchers led by ECS member Clare Grey, detailed research in the journal Science on the path to the “ultimate” battery. According to the study, the researchers stated they had successfully demonstrated how to overcome many of the problems preventing the theoretically promising lithium-air battery from being commercially viable.
The key component to this research relies on a highly porous, “fluffy” carbon electrode made from graphene. The researchers cautioned that although the preliminary results were very promising, much work was yet to be done to take lithium-air batteries from the lab to the marketplace.
However, the research got many scientists in energy science and technology talking. Like all groundbreaking results, there has been much discussion and some controversy over the research published by Grey and her team.
